Unity code, p.6
Unity Code, page 6
Norris skipped over the next three minutes of footage.
“So let me get this straight,” said Bumper as the sergeant worked. “Aliens are upset about the Great Barrier Reef?”
JP shrugged. “Something about the inherent foolishness of allowing the degradation of biomes in exchange for your own wants.”
“How the fuck did any of these cultures or peoples or whatever industrialize without some kind of environmental damage? I assume that they did, or how else would they have gotten off their planets?”
“I have no idea, Bumper.”
“But they’re going to condemn us for it?”
“I don’t think it really matters what the problem is,” Scurvy said, cutting off the argument. “What’s important here is whether they have the capacity for—”
“Here we go,” Norris announced.
The video started again.
“They’re offering us a choice,” the Envoy was saying. “Correct the issues, with the help of their collective wisdom, gleaned from millennia of experience, or be…neutralized. Before we can take our poison to the rest of the galaxy.”
“Neutralized?” somebody in the hall asked.
“They have prepared a demonstration for us,” the girl replied.
“Sergeant Norris, pause this,” Cactus ordered. “I think we’ve all seen enough. Let’s look at the actual data on Clark.”
“With pleasure, sir.” The cyber superintendent minimized the video and brought up a separate slide deck, this one marked with different seals in the upper corners.
“Clark Air Base was hit while she was talking,” JP said, a hint of emotion creeping into his words. “We don’t know how and we don’t know with what. The electrical grid’s down across Luzon—”
“The entire island went dark?” Cactus asked sharply.
“Unsure at this time,” JP replied. “Manila’s gone out, that we know. Right now it looks like everything within a forty-mile radius of Clark was affected.”
Scurvy made a gesture to Norris, and he went to the next slide. JP kept talking.
“We’re also picking up similar blackouts on Taiwan at Kaohsiung, and Guangzhou on the mainland.”
“And Colorado Springs,” Bumper added. “NORAD and Space Command are both out of contact.”
Cactus nodded, taking it in. “They hit us both. Why?”
“Probably because these are critical regional power projection locations for both sides,” JP said. “Right now, the Pentagon is speculating they’re trying to prevent us from going to war.”
“Why the fuck would that matter to aliens?” Bumper muttered.
“Norris,” Rover ordered, “let’s go back to the video.”
“—bring us Unity. There is no collective federation, no imperium ruling all. But they have come to advise us, these interstellar abiota, but communication is difficult.” She tapped her crown. “In order to find our way out of this mess, out of our own blindness, some of us must have our eyes open. Some of us must ascend. Some of us must join Unity now, so we may all join later.”
“She’s talking about some type of NULI, in case you’re wondering,” JP said, and Norris paused again. “Brain implants, that let you talk to this galactic…whatever it is.”
“Babysitter?” Blanket asked, derisive.
“Overlord?” Menendez added.
Rover rubbed his forehead. “Look, team, this is not our problem to solve. What’s real or not, what’s going on, what America’s going to do, that’s all way above our level. We need to stay focused on what we can control, like getting 2Shy somewhere where we can put her down.” He nodded to Cactus. “To your point.”
“Why not just land her?” Sausage asked.
“She can’t see. All but the nose camera is dead,” JP said, “and all the other instrumentation is fucked. We need to pass her off to an on-site Launch and Recovery Element in order to bring her down safely, and Clark’s won’t be working. Besides, she won’t survive without sustainment power.”
“Where’s she headed now?” Blanket asked.
“The Marine FOB at Chanthaburi,” JP said.
“Shit! That’s like six hundred miles away, across the entire damn Bathtub. Is she going to make it?”
“There’s nowhere else safe,” the intel lead said calmly. “Don’t worry, she’s a smart girl and Highlander’s riding with her right now. She’ll get there.”
Rover tapped his notebook. JP had put together a good briefing, and on the fly, too. Sometimes, he forgot how efficient the major could be, when sufficiently motivated. “Any other questions, Cactus? I can have the SECRET packet sent to your office machine if you’d like.”
“Do that,” Cactus said, and rose. Everyone else got to their feet in deference. The man didn’t even have the decency to tell them to keep their seats.
Getting crowned Wing King had done terrible things to Cactus’s ego, Rover thought.
After Cactus was gone, JP clicked off the screen. “That’s everything I’ve got, folks. When I know more, you’ll know more. Try to keep the rumors down in your sections though, please. It’s not going to do anybody any good.”
“Hear that, sir,” Scurvy agreed.
And people began filing out.
The chief lingered after everyone else had gone. He pulled his chair closer to Rover’s.
“Something you wanted to add?”
“Yeah.” Scurvy tapped the intel packet. “Did you notice how vague these demands are? There’s no process, and no deadline, for what they want us to be doing right now. If we’re talking about aliens that are smart enough to get there, I have to think they’re smart enough to understand deadlines. That this is intentional.”
“How so?”
“Makes the whole thing just a little scarier now, doesn’t it? ‘We can zap you all out of existence, any time we please, and we’re not going to tell you how to avoid it.’ What kind of stupid shit do you think might happen next?” Scurvy didn’t say anything for a moment. “Or maybe they just haven’t told us yet because it’s so far off. Or maybe we’re talking about years, decades, nothing to worry about.”
Rover shook his head. “Somehow, I get the impression that this emissary mission, whatever it is, is the culmination of their evaluation, not the start of it.”
Chief rose. Slid the packet back over to Rover. “One problem at a time, sir. Don’t turn this into a catastrophe. We can’t do anything about it here anyway.” He smiled. “We’ve got enough of our own shit to deal with this week.”
“Yeah,” Rover said, and flipped his intel packet back open to the image of that girl—the Envoy, or Unity’s representative, or whatever she was. Who was she? How had she gotten pulled into this? Was she being puppeted, the same as any baseline kugu, or did she really have the freedom of thought and movement she claimed? “Yeah, I should probably get back on it.”
It took another three hours to get the inbrief banged into anything resembling something respectable.
Rover made a mental note—literally, a note, recorded in his NULI—to devise a creative and embarrassing punishment for the idiot lieutenants who had put the thing together.
But it would have gone a lot quicker had Staff Sergeant Menendez shown back up. She’d taken off after the Envoy briefing. It had seemed like there was something more she wanted to say earlier, and he wanted to know what that was.
So, since he was finally done with briefing prep, he went looking.
He found her in the central workroom over at Base Cyber Surety, stripping the ends of copper cable, crimping connectors onto the exposed wires. Rover didn’t know much about their specialty, but he knew busy work when he saw it. Either her own supervisor, that idiot Keyes, had assigned it to her, or she was trying not to deal with something else.
Judging from the way she looked at him when he came in, he thought it was the latter.
She started to stand up. He waved her down. Unlike Cactus, Rover hated playing that game. Everybody stand up when the commander walks in. Archaic nonsense. If somebody was working, he wanted to keep them working.
“You were saying something to Norris, during the briefing. What was it?”
“Sir,” she began with a sigh.
“I’m not in your direct chain, and I won’t tell Keyes. Okay? What’s the problem?”
She huffed out a breath. “That speech, some of the lines in there. Sounds really familiar.”
“What do you mean?”
Menendez looked at her cable clamps. “This might sound insane, but I’d swear that parts of it are lifted straight out of Orpheus Watch. You know how the station is one of the last bastions of mankind, after ecological catastrophe here?”
Rover frowned. “I don’t really watch it.”
“It sounds like something the main scientist character would say. She’s a biologist, and—”
“Can you find me what you mean?”
“Why?”
Because I don’t believe there’s nothing we can do. He didn’t say it. “Curiosity.”
“Maybe,” she said, and stuck a fresh connector head into her clamps.
7
“Never thought I’d see this again.”
“We haven’t had a crash like this here in decades.”
“Not here, Rover. Fuckin’ Red Cloud.”
Half the full-timers on base had gathered up on the roof of Building One this morning to watch the Air Force aircraft disaster response team dig what remained of Storm Gryphon Three out of the golf course. The team had arrived yesterday, and apparently already got whatever they needed out of the site itself. They’d been working with the base fire department since the night of the crash on that. Now, they needed the plane somewhere where they could give it a deeper examination.
Sure, watching this wasn’t a great use of anybody’s time, or taxpayer money, but it was…necessary, somehow.
Cathartic.
His entire team was here, as were most of the senior staff from the Sinkhole. That included Navarro, who’d been swept up in the week’s recall.
This alien bullshit…
They were supposed to be getting a full background brief this morning, not just the packet from the day before. JP was working the issue with his counterparts up at Andrews in Washington, D.C. There were a whole lot of questions right now, a whole lot, and Rover was grateful the military seemed to be moving fast on getting them some kind of answers. Even if the information that came down wasn’t one hundred percent accurate and complete, having a baseline was a good place to start.
It would help.
Maybe.
When the base was this crowded, the usual military propensity for rumormongering got so much worse. Ellington was too small. Too familiar. Best get everybody some answers before things got out of hand.
Rover brought himself back to the moment. To what the sergeant had just said. “You were at Red Cloud, Navarro?”
“Signal Corps, yeah. I was off duty, out at a bar actually, when the Chinese hit the base.”
Rover wondered why he’d never heard about this before. “So you were there for the Battle of Uijeongbu. Fuck.”
“First and last abiota-human aerial battle of the war. But it didn’t matter how good our planes were. Their shit just kept coming across the DMZ.” The NASA engineer sounded very far away. “What a fucked-up week that was.”
“Emily was doing now what she was doing then, Navarro. Trying to keep us safe.”
“You think they give a shit about us?” Navarro huffed.
It was a strange comment. “What do you mean?”
But the NCO just glanced away. “Never mind,” he muttered.
Rover followed his gaze. One of the Storm Gryphons pilots was headed over.
“Lieutenant Colonel Marsden?” he asked.
“Rover,” Rover replied. “And it’s Troll, right?”
“That’s right. Nate Takamori. The boss needed to head out to Arizona, deal with some shit for the next show, so you’ve got me for however long this takes.” Out beyond the Sinkhole, a crane was starting to winch up a wing. “Sorry for the mess we made of your golf course.”
“Eh, it was crappy anyway,” he said. “Apologize to the county. They’re the ones that maintain it.”
Troll laughed. “It wouldn’t be a real Air Force base without golf.”
“I’m sorry about your aircraft,” he said. “Always sucks, losing a teammate.”
“Nobody died, thank god.”
Rover frowned. “The abiota, Major.”
Troll grunted. “Predictives are all pressed out of the same programming templates, Colonel Marsden, and we can’t afford the planes on the demonstration team developing personalities. God forbid we get an emergence. They’re all wiped and reloaded every three hundred flight-hours or so.”
“Trying to prevent them getting their own ideas about things?”
“Something like that. Sucks, but it’s a public safety issue,” Troll said. “We didn’t know either of these two very well yet.”
“Maybe it would be safer to let them develop. Whatever was being done to them, Emily seemed to resist it just fine.”
“No offense, Colonel, but Emily seems a little crazy.”
Rover laughed. “You’re not wrong.”
“Inspection team inbrief still at 1300 today?” Troll asked.
“Wing conference room. Don’t be late. Cactus is going to want to put on a good face for the team.”
“With respect, Rover, that’s your problem, not mine.”
For a moment, Rover didn’t answer. Watched them mark out another chunk of wing. He needed to get back to the briefing room, make sure they’d fixed everything the el-tees had screwed up. Cactus was in a foul mood this morning, and fucking up the briefing slides was only going to make things worse.
He didn’t move, though. Some things, a man needed to see for himself.
“Right now,” Rover muttered, “it’s everyone’s problem.”
“Daelia Hall? I’d like a word.”
It was early yet, the morning chill insidious and wet. Daelia hadn’t slept well last night, and finally gave it up around 0500. She’d dragged one of the test carts out into the parking lot herself in the diagnostic process. She’d taken her monocle off to focus better, but Ginger’s AR form kept running across the cart’s monitor.
So far, so good. She couldn’t find any damage to her abiota’s rudiment core.
Couldn’t find any sign of what had been done, actually. Physically, apart from some superficial body work, Ginger looked fine.
Which was just making Daelia all the more suspicious. So she set Ginger’s TGLP backup logs to download. There had to be something there. Maybe the same issues they were seeing on Sunday, in the base AR.
“If Rover sent you out here,” she called back, “tell him I’m busy, but I’ll be there at the inbrief.”
“I was hoping to catch you before the inbrief, actually.”
Not a familiar voice. She extracted herself from the underside of Ginger’s hood, squinting as the morning light hit her face fully.
There was a man there, somebody she didn’t recognize. Late forties, short-cropped graying hair, about as average as they came. Somebody with authority, she thought, and used to getting his way. Probably an officer. She couldn’t see his rank patch.
“Who are you?”
He stepped forward, hand out. “Colonel Marc Levinson. I’m here with the ACC SIB—”
“That, you’re going to have to translate for me,” she said, and looked at her own gloved hands. She wiped some stray grease on her coveralls, pulling a paper towel off the cart to deal with something higher up on her left sleeve.
Nonconducting gloves were always a recommended safety item when dealing with abiota, but in her case, she had to be extra careful. The brace was like a lightning rod. There was a built-in capacitor, of course, but that could get overloaded. She had custom-made gloves that went all the way up to her shoulder. She’d long gotten used to the feel of it, but it made her sweat something fierce. In the summer, the fingertips would fill up with moisture.
“The SIB is the investigation board from Air Combat Command.”
“Uh-huh,” she said, stalling a little. Something about this felt off to her, and she realized what it was. “No call sign. You’re not a pilot?”
“I’m the board’s president. I’m the ACC A3/OCI commander. Cyber Integrations.”
Daelia had no idea what that was. A3 was the segment of the command structure tasked with handling direct operational stuff, but that was as much as she knew. “Did ACC run out of pilots?”
Levinson laughed. “I badgered my way onto the board. It’s a cyber issue, at the end of the day. It’s not every day we get our abiota friends tearing each other apart this publicly.” He rubbed his hands together. “Anywhere we could talk for a minute?”
Daelia looked him over. She wondered, for a crazy moment, if this had anything to do with the kugu. “This official?”
“Not yet, and I’d like to keep it that way.”
“Okay,” she said. “We can talk inside.”
She didn’t bother with the main conference room, Dad’s office, any of that. She was filthy and wasn’t about to smear grease all over the nice chairs. She led him around the side gate, onto the tarmac and around, into the hangar. This early in the morning, the sun hit the doors full-on, but it wasn’t too hot yet. Daelia had left the main doors open this morning.
“Nice place Lee has here,” Levinson said, looking around.
She really hoped he wasn’t here about the kugu. No way was she going to lie her way out of that if asked directly. She was terrible at lying.
Instead, Daelia went over to where the Army’s bitzers were parked in their sustainment cradles. After their little adventure in the park, they were caked in mud and had all kinds of interesting junk shoved up in their chassis. A whole bunch of shit she had to clean out.
Daelia wondered if they’d done it on purpose.
They would wait.
“You know my dad?” she asked and started stripping her gloves off. The left side took some work. Made a wet squelching sound as she yanked it off.
